An Event Apart: Care to Compare

In her Care to Compare talk at An Event Apart in Atlanta, GA 2013 Colleen Jones shared a number of tips for designing effective comparisons on the Web. Here are my notes from his talk:

People go to Websites to make decisions. We can design effective ways of making these choices.

Mobile Website users who booked hotels viewed more than double the number of hotels compared to people who did not book a hotel. Instead of following a structured path to booking hotels, people blazed their own trail: they looked at a number of hotels and ultimately only a low percentage of people booked. So comparisons are important.

There’s four steps to consider when to making comparisons effective.

Chose the right kind of comparison

Self-comparison: show the differences between your products or services using text, images, videos, and animations.

Competitive-comparison: show differences between your solutions and those from competitors. This can prevent people from going to other sites and show you’re not afraid of what competitors are offering. You can be explicit or focus on what makes your offering unique.